The Topography of Tears is a study of 100 tears photographed through a light microscope, magnified 100x or 400x. The project began in a period of personal change, loss, and copious tears. One day I wondered if my tears of grief would look any different from my tears of happiness - and I set out to explore them up close, using tools of science to make art and to ponder personal and aesthetic questions.

Years later, this series comprises a wide range of my own and others’ tears, from elation to onions, as well as sorrow, frustration, rejection, resolution, laughing, yawning, birth and rebirth, and many more, each a tiny history. The random compositions I find in magnified tears often evoke a sense of place, like aerial views of emotional terrain. Although the empirical nature of tears is a chemistry of water, proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes, the topography of tears is a momentary landscape, transient as the fingerprint of someone in a dream. This series is like an ephemeral atlas. Roaming microscopic vistas, I marvel at the visual similarities between micro and macro realms, how the patterning of nature seems so consistent, regardless of scale. Patterns of erosion etched into earth over millions of years may look quite similar to the branched crystalline patterns of an evaporated tear that took less than a minute to occur.

Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis: shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.

Peter Andres (Series: More than I can see") about:

More than I can see is an opus in four parts. I try to make my world’s view slightly larger than that which is currently “usual”. The conventional view of the world with birth, raise and take care, enjoy life in all variations (or not), death - finish is a little too close to me. I started this work in June 2012. The origin lies far back, until about the year 1995. Successively I expanded the images. The last series I added in August 2014.

All of Nothing — Nothing of Everything

What’s the feeling of luxury to have everything - really everything! Everything about nothing... To have nothing, nothing to need – nothing from everything! The complete waiver! What is this feeling? The total detachment from all material. And yet a lot remains - the total wealth! The first picture is just black. However, with a hint of not so black in the middle. Physical substance is not present. But of course the mental plan is. However, the physical substance is hardly more than a breath, at maximum heat impression! In contrast, the last picture is just white, with a hint of not so white on the edges. It symbolizes the purely mental after the last remaining part of the physical has been passed away. The infinite freedom!

And what's in between? WE! And what do we do? WORK! Mental work is what we have to look for! The two images between them symbolizes the transitions. Picture 2: The transformation begins, the physical solidifies according to the mental model. Picture 4: The mental forces rise, the physical becomes less and less. We have a dimension with the greatest possible extent. Everything from Nothing to Nothing of Everything. More is not possible.